It's do as I say, not do as I do, when it comes to backups and recovery for a professional sysadmin in off time.
Back in the game
Back in January, this machine started struggling with a failing disk. I didn't notice for a couple of weeks until it had a dire effect on all the services the machine supports around here (which had a knock-on effect on other devices).
Unfortunately, despite being a professional sysadmin by day, when it comes to the maintenance and care of my own stuff I am terrible. Nothing was backed up properly, certainly not sufficiently to replace the disk and go to a bare metal restore, so what with limited free time and all it has taken nearly a month real time to get all the services back and running. First there was finding the time to buy the disk. Then there was finding the time to actually stuff it in the case and shift the disks around. After that came installing the minimal operating system that allowed me to get the new disk up as the primary, followed by a long time poking around trying to bring that installation back in line with the old disk, and recover the contents. Data copy time alone took a couple of weeks, because of all the read retries on the old disk. Finally came all the trial and error to bring the esoteric stuff back online (web cam, etc). And I forgot the first rule of diagnostics and repair - never change more than one factor at any given time - by taking the opportunity to install a new USB 3 PCI express card to run better cameras which, it turns out, delayed me another week because it simply isn't working with the current drivers but I was assuming it was the recovery of the camera configs which was at fault. Never trust a professional.
You know what they say: if you want it done right, do it yourself. Oh...
Still - back now. All's well that ends well.
